Hey, there!
This week, I'm continuing my series on my take-aways from the TeachersPayTeachers conference last week. I'm so, so thankful that we have access to all the sessions through the month of July. What a great month of learning!
The session I'm highlighting today was hosted by Tanya from The Butterfly Teacher: Turn Your Blogging Hate Into Love.
Let me start out with my feelings about blogging... I actually like it. There's something sort of therapeutic about it. I suppose that stems from the fact that I have a box full of all my old diaries and journals that I've written in since 2nd grade-ish. I just like to write.
That doesn't mean that I don't get caught up in the "I can't think of anything to blog about" excuse, because writing in a diary or journal is different from writing a focused blog post.
Also, I have not been good at using my blog to promote products from my store.
I started this blog in March of 2013. Looking back, 2013 - 2016 were great blogging years for me. I blogged pretty regularly those years. Then, I kind of fell off the wagon, and it's been pretty hit or miss for me since then. I definitely haven't made it a priority.
I'd like to, though.
Last year, I did a lot of learning about #theScienceofReading (I've started to see that hashtag pop up in my Instagram feed more often). I went through the first volume of LETRS, and I really loved it. I'd love to go through it again this year, sharing little tidbits with you each month.
So...
A big take away that I'm going to work on TODAY is building and adding some UTM codes to my blog. 🙌 So, you might notice the general layout changing a little.
Another big take away for me was Tanya's secret for better SEO... Google. Thank you, Google, for doing all the work for us! I definitely plan to Google and check out the "People also ask..." section and the keywords and phrases provided at the end. I want to get me some of that SEO gold!
I also loved the idea of batching. Maybe that will help me with consistency of blogging, to choose one day a month to just whip out as many blogs as possible to schedule to post on certain days. Love it!
But...
I do have a follow-up question that I intend on reaching out and asking Tanya. Back in 2013 - 2016 when blogging was a much bigger push in the teacher world, there were so many ways to get connected with other bloggers and to get your blog seen. There were tons of linky parties and little groups of teachers from this or that area that met up and networked.
Do those still exist? The one I used to be a part of disbanded, I think. How do bloggers today get all the eyes on their blog posts? Pinterest pins? SEO and internet searches? Perhaps people don't really 'follow' blogs anymore, like they did back then?
Have a productive day!
